Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Conductor known for championing unfamiliar music and being self-taught.
On the island
Eight records
String Quartet No. 14 in D minor, D. 810 ('Death and the Maiden') - 1st movement
One of the first works which made a tremendous impression on me was the Schubert Death and the Maiden, and I'd like to hear the first tremendous movement of that regularly on the Desert Island, to start me working all over again.
The Magic Flute (Queen of the Night's recitative and aria from Act I)
It meant so much to me, the whole opera meant so much to me when I was a student, and it still does.
The Garden Where the Praties Grow
He influenced me more than anyone else in how to sing right through a line. And I want ... I met her in the garden where the praeties grow because he manages to be so expressive with so few breaths.
I'd have to have Rowan Atkinson, and I'd have to have one of his most economical presentations, his roll call of students.
I think if I lived well to a hundred years I should never become the master in any sphere of music making that the Nightingale is and as I'm a very keen bird watcher and bird photographer, I'd have to have the Nightingale on the island with me to remind me just what expertise really is.
Meditations on a Theme by John Blow (Lambs)
City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Vernon Handley
I think it's the only record of the eight that I'd like to hear myself conducting because the CBSO worked so very hard at this piece and put in a wonderful result.
I'd have to have Charles Groves's tremendous recording of it, so that that first chorus would push the waves back.
The Garden of FandFavourite
London Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Sir Adrian Boult
I'd have to have the beautiful tune from his tone poem The Garden of Fand. It means a very great deal to me.
In conversation
Presenter asks
3:02Were your parents musical?
Yes, my father had sung in Llanduff Cathedral Choir and sustained a good tenor voice up to his sixty-fifth year. ... And my mother taught piano, but she didn't teach me.
Presenter asks
3:02When did you get the first interest [in music], and how was it?
I was very interested in singing and everything that I heard from a small boy, but when I was about eight, I heard a radio broadcast of Holst's This Have I Done for My True Love, unaccompanied chorus. And it had the most extraordinary effect on me. ... And it was from that day, I think, that I determined to teach myself and see what music would lead me to.
Presenter asks
8:08While you were at Oxford, had you formulated what you wanted to do, what your career should be?
Not really. I was conducting, I think, with more enthusiasm than I was doing anything else ... But I didn't see how an unofficial musician could become a conductor, yet it was what I wanted. And it was really only when I had a few successful concerts there at Oxford that I thought, well, I must ditch everything else and go for conducting.
The keepsakes
The book
R. G. Collingwood
I still have a great deal to learn about the principles behind the music that I love and and work with. And so I would take a work called The Principles of Art by R. G. Collingwood, who actually tries to discover what it is that makes art tick. ... there actually seems to be a science inside art which makes it work.
The luxury
SodaStream with unlimited gas cylinders
Well, I've got one vice in life, and that is one. Yes, only one, but I indulge it richly, and that is fizzy drinks. Presumably there will be a spring fresh water spring. Well, I'll have to take a soda stream with me and an unlimited supply of gas cylinders, because I must have Fiz every day.
Presenter asks
10:52How does Vernon Handley become Todd?
Well, it happened when I was quite small, and it continues. I actually walk in a peculiar way. I walk with my feet turned in, and I toddle. And my father said of my elder brother and myself, they are toddlers. And the name stuck so that everybody now calls me Todd.
Presenter asks
11:28How did you set about [running your own orchestra]? I mean had you got financial backing?
No, none at all. ... the thing to do was either to get into an opera house and become a repetitor, or to conduct as much amateur stuff as you could, since my keyboard was so desperately weak. ... For me, it was conducting amateur choral societies, women's institutes, amateur orchestras, schools, concerts, anything.
“I've always been a sort of self-taught musician and self-taught at the other things I've been interested in in life”
“I don't have a creative impulse. I'm a recreator as a conductor. I like to understand the language of composers, and I myself haven't got a musically creative side to my personality.”
“For me, in all art, economy is the most important thing.”